article 5.19.06

Meditating on the landscape

from Memphis Commercial Appeal

May 19, 2006


The Romans appreciated the pastoral genre in poetry and in the mural decoration of their villas, but the Middle Ages regarded landscape art with suspicion, the physical world being viewed as fallen and sinful. Artists in the Renaissance often included fantastic or idealized landscapes as background for their religious paintings or portraits, like the misty topography against which Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" poses.



Landscape painting as a genre was born in 16th century Netherlands and northeastern Italy as the traditions of purely devotional art faded before the secular interests of a rising mercantile class. Soon, the genre became a conduit for cultural feelings about the relationship between humans and nature, and such artists as the French Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (circa 1605-1682) and Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael (circa 1628-1682) were producing landscape paintings fraught with atmosphere and implication.

At the end of the 18th century, Romantic beliefs that nature was imbued with spiritual qualities and that human consciousness and the sentience of nature were only a blink apart impelled such efforts as Constable's agreeably pastoral depictions of the English countryside and German artist Caspar David Friedrich's intensely poetic landscape paintings.

The American Hudson River School (circa 1825-1875), influenced by a notion of the sublime, with its implications of scope and grandeur, reached apotheosis with Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt's enormous canvases depicting Western mountain landscapes in anthem-like tribute to manifest destiny.

French Impressionists like Monet and Pissarro worked the opposite strain in landscape, reducing the sublime to intimate studies of the effects of light through shifting moments of time.

Landscape painting fell on hard times in the 20th century as a genre deemed inappropriate for the fragmentation and psychological subjectivity of modernism.

So, where does the long heritage of landscape painting leave the artists who are showing work in Memphis now?

"Landscape is really a manifestation of a world view," said Meer, whose dimly glowing paintings, with titles like "Begin," "Late" and "Awake" take landscape toward the extreme borders of realism.

"My work is headed toward complete abstraction, toward oblivion. You can't just jump into nonrepresentation. You have to come up with a system of solutions for representing things, the way light hits an object or a piece of land, and reduce it to essentials. You have to arrive there from a long process. It points back to Eastern ideas of enlightenment through repetition, reduction through doing something and practicing something. If you watch any great athlete or musician, the process seems simple, but duplicating it is impossible."

Meer, 37, started in architecture but has a degree in graphic design from the University of Memphis.

An issue in landscape painting is working en plein air, as the French call it, that is, painting, or at least sketching, outside directly from nature. That process was essential for the Impressionists, but Meer does not regard it as important.

"Really, I never paint outside," said Meer. "My process is 21st century. I use the computer and the Internet as a tool. I download thousands of photographs. It's an abstract process of appropriation and synthesis."

Despite his reliance on new technology, Meer insists on the metaphysical nature of his landscape paintings.

"I'm striving for the inner life of nature," he said, "trying to comprehend more than we ordinarily comprehend. These paintings should be objects of contemplation like an icon, but a point of meditation, more for spirituality than prayer. The paradox of meditation is that you go deeper inside yourself in order to lose yourself. That's what I'm after."

-- Fredric Koeppel: 529-2376